The first of these was originally published in GPU Pro 2. Unfortunately, I missed some errors that crept into the typeset version, so I was pleased to finally correct those and I took the opportunity to rework a few sentences for greater clarity as well. Now that it’s online, I’ll also be able to refer directly to certain sections in follow-up blog posts on the subject.

The second took the form of a journal entry for the Microsoft Game Developer Network, which went up in the spring. It may have flown under your radar, as I’ve since spoken to a few developers who hadn’t seen it, yet were keen to have such a tool in their engine. For NDA reasons, I can’t go into all of the implementation details here, so think of it as a ‘graphical appetiser’.

In a way, the two topics are related: the primary goal of a visibility system is to efficiently remove parts of the world that can’t be seen from a given viewpoint, whereas the purpose of a debug overshading mode is to directly visualise pixel shader work, some of which can likewise have zero contribution to the final image.

I think it’s also fair to say that keeping both forms of redundancy in check is a critical part of optimising the rendering performance of most AAA titles. For that reason, I hope you find these articles useful, and as always, please let me know what you think!

Both HPG and SIGGRAPH were a blast and I’m intending to write up a full report soon, but here are some links to conference content in the meantime. If you have any additional sources, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll update the post accordingly.

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend:Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” - Blondie

Saddle Up!

In this post, I’ll be reviewing some existing methods for attaining well-behaved specular lighting. I’ll also cover a simple twist on these that fits better with current game lighting approaches and console memory constraints.

What do I mean by well-behaved? I’m talking about avoiding specular highlight shimmering on bumpy surfaces, as well as achieving the right appearance in the distance: the combined effect of these bumps as individual wrinkles and irregularities become too small to make out. Can we do all of this on a budget? Let’s hit the trail and find out!